The RTL SDR dongles have been around for many years now. Correct me if I’m wrong, but they must be over 2 decades old at this point. I remember buying my first one, it must be like 15+ years ago from China. That old DVBT/DAB/FM RTL2832 R820T USB Dongle served me well. I still have it today. I was tempted to get it out and see if it still works, but I’m too busy with other things at the moment. I did fire it up about a year ago and it still worked fine. Picked up lots of signals. One of the latest SDR dongles, the RTL SDR V4 [pictured below], is much more advanced than the dongles from 15 years ago.

RTL SDR V4 R828D RTL2832U frequency range is 500 kHz to 1.7 GHz. It’s extremely versatile, has excellent frequency stability and reception, in-built HF up-conversion for great HF signal reception. VHF and UHF also very good. And it has a powered bias tee, so it can work in unison with amplifiers and active antennas. The RTL SDR V4 Version 4 R828D RTL2832U works great with all the best software publicly available on the Internet, like SDR# sharp, SDR++ [sdrpp], SDRangel, SDR Console and a whole host of plugins for the mentioned software’s.

SDR dongles have risen in price over the last few years. The price on websites like eBay and Amazon have become almost the same as just buying direct from Asia or one of the many websites that now stock SDR dongles. So go with whichever outlet you prefer to purchase from as they are all very similarly priced.

Unless buying second hand, the RTL SDR V4 is one of the cheapest to purchase brand new. So If you want to get started in the world of SDR receiving and want to have access to a wide receive spectrum, the RTL SDR V4 is probably the best place to start. It’s comparably cheap in price, easy to install on Desktop PCs, Laptops, Tablets, Raspberry Pi [Windows, Linux, Android etc] and very capable.